John Cole, October 12th:

That isn’t taking the side of the banksters, that is taking the side of common sense. What possible use could there be for a nationwide halt to foreclosures?

(emphasis mine)

Me, October 12th:

Why should there be a national foreclosure moratorium? Because only 23 states deal with foreclosures in the courts, and for the rest of us, tough luck. There’s no oversight at all.

(emphasis mine)

John Cole, responding to me later that same day:

Forty state AG’s are on the ball, what exactly could a national moratorium do? The idea is to stop the bad foreclosures, not grind every single transaction in this sector to a damned halt.

You aren’t hurting the banksters when you do something like that. You’re hurting every single buyer and seller in the market.

(emphasis mine)

Me, still later, in response:

See, here’s the thing; the market isn’t functioning now. It’s rapidly worsening, digging itself in deeper by the day. It’s not a little technicality when you sign a false affidavit or ‘borrow’ someone else’s notary stamp, and the courts aren’t likely to see it that way. Combine that with the countless tales of horrific abuses, easily located by anyone with half a brain and Google, and you quickly realize that this is an emergency. Whether the Feds or the states intervene, the outcome is going to be the same; the mortgage market is DOA until this is sorted out. Title insurers are already balking, and 40 states are digging. Real estate lawyers probably need a smoke after the repeated serial orgasms they get after reading the news each morning. Face reality for a change: this moratorium is happening.

We have but two choices: do it in an orderly fashion, with rule of law, or let it happen in anarchic disarray, and cross our fingers. Hoping that the same individuals who hired hair stylists to forge legal documents by the thousands will suddenly have a change of heart and ‘fix’ this is fantastic delusion akin to believing Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States of Americ… oh wait. Darn.

Look who I’m talking to.

(emphasis mine)

October 22nd:

The Foreclosure Mess Hits Home

by John Cole

Is there anyone out there who can help Kirk out?

Explanation from Kirk, excerpted:

Example one, today. I got a phone call from the BoA team that informed the house was still under foreclosure. “What about the foreclosure freeze?” “It’ll end November 1st.” Wait, what? See, in Georgia they can only sell the house on the second Tuesday of the month. They announced the freeze just after the first Tuesday of October, and they’re telling me (but not the press) that they’re going to end it on the first Monday of November — meaning the sale isn’t delayed at all. But I was speaking of the home workout.

…

If this were a judicial state, by the way, that would be enough to challenge the whole issue of foreclosure on the question of where the note might be. It would be enough to do so in many other non-judicial states as well. Here in Georgia it’s not enough. Servicer can proceed. Trust me, I’ve asked.

It’s quite apparent BoA doesn’t want to do a workout, and will reject even due to its own mistakes.

I expect to lose the house – I’m rather resigned to it, actually. Angry, but resigned. But I will never trust any of the banks that are involved in this mortgage mess again. I cannot trust them to act in good faith.

I suspect I’m not alone.

(emphasis still mine)

I’ve said it before about the continued naivete of Obama supporters, and I’ll say it again: the tragedy is that the harm they help him inflict with their idolatry isn’t limited to themselves.

Juan Williams, longtime NPR contributor who moonlit as a token liberal for Fox News, finally got himself canned after years of flaunting NPR’s policy on their people appearing on punditry shows, for a comment (appropriately enough) he made on Bill-O-the-Clown’s show.

Principled Conservative E.D. Kain said no, Williams shouldn’t have been canned, because while he admitted to being prejudiced, he argued against implementing that prejudice as government policy:

If you look at the entire conversation between O’Reilly and Williams – and not just the out-of-context video clip that Think Progress supplied us with – it becomes pretty obvious that he’s talking about an irrational fear he experiences and the need to protect the rights of all Americans including Muslim Americans against the sort of things that this kind of fear might lead to at a political level. He also talks about the consequences of broadly painting all Muslims as enemies, and how pundits have a responsibility to resist this impulse.

Longtime BJer DougJ responded that this firing was a long time coming, and this wasn’t an isolated instance of him pissing off NPR over one comment… which ignores the problem Kain asks about, namely, whether or not what Williams said works even as a pretext to fire him.

So who’s right? Well, first of all, I will hate Kain for years for getting me to watch several minutes of the O’Reilly Factor. Juan Williams’ bigotry may be somewhat congenial, but Bill O’Reilly’s absolutely isn’t. Listening to this asshat bellow and gesticulate about how ‘whole nations’ of Muslims are at war with us, and how the anti-immigrant movement in Europe against Muslims justify his own hate.

Remarkable. Arguing that Germany, I repeat, GERMANY having a strained relationship with an ethnic or religious minority automatically is the minority’s fault? Is there any possible way Bill-O can learn less from history?

Yes, as Kain says, Juan Williams does argue against casting all Muslims as evil or violent or as terrorists, or discriminating against an entire religion for the violence of some of its members.

He also agrees with Bill-O that there was no backlash against Muslims in America after 9/11.

What the fuck?

Williams’ position in this area is incoherent, his sucking up to O’Reilly, an outright hatemonger, is intolerable, and his appearance on the show itself should never have been allowed, according to NPR’s own standards. He’s also wrong on the facts, and remarkably ignorant, if he doesn’t know about the anti-Muslim backlash America went through over 9/11. Personal anecdote: In the student housing where I lived some clown tried to put a brick through the glass door that week because they thought we were the dorm full of Muslim international students (which was actually the one across the way – silly bigots). More broadly here in America, there were beatings, there were attacks and there were mass detentions by Ashcroft, on and on. Civil liberties were trampled in the immediate hysteria.

So Kain is right that Williams tries to moderate O’Reilly’s overt bigotry in favor of his own milder prejudices. He’s wrong that this means that he should be retained by NPR. Williams’ putting his bigotry out there in public might be commendable if he in fact recognized it and dealt with it; he does not. By painting a rosy, ahistorical picture of America’s relationship with Islam post 9/11, he demonstrates his severe myopia, always a fatal flaw for ‘journalists’, and by appearing on a punditry show he violates NPR policies, which were constructed precisely to avoid this occurrence tainting their straight news focus!

DougJ is wrong if he thinks that this episode in a vacuum wouldn’t justify firing Williams (though that’s not clear from his post). Being this ignorant of events that happened so recently, and going on a talking head show to publicly proclaim your ignorance while agreeing more often than not with a fiery bigot? That’s not journalism, and a journalist should get canned for it.

Meanwhile Juan Cole over at Informed Comment employs the No True Scotsman fallacy in his piece comparing European separatist attacks to Islamic ones (which I’m not sure was the focus of the O’Reilly piece, which covered immigration in Europe but not terrorism against Europeans per se):

A Europol report on terrorist attacks in Europe in 2009 [pdf] says that out of hundreds of terrorist attacks iin Europe in 2009, most were the work of ethnic separatists. About 40 were carried out by members of the extreme left. A handful by the European far right. See also this analysis.

One by persons of Muslim heritage (I do not say ‘by a Muslim’ because terrorism is forbidden in Islamic law).

Ooh yes, the consistency and objective reliability of a definition based on ‘Islamic law’. Give me a break. If someone considers themselves a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Christian, then, well, they are. If there was a standard for religious hypocrisy or ignoring the plain text of your religious teachings then most religious people would have been booted into agnosticism a long time ago. Religious affiliation is an entirely subjective standard, short of those religions that double as exclusive clubs with a fixed membership and hierarchy.

What’s next, saying that all adulterers can’t be Christians? What about murderers? Pretty sure that’s in the old Ten Commandments, right?

This is an extremely common argument by religion defenders. Whenever a religious whackaloon goes nuts, there’s inevitably a backlash against blaming religion, in any way, for causing the problem, because buried somewhere in a particular holy book full of violence and slaughter, there was a passage, or two, or more even, saying that violence is bad in some way.

That isn’t an argument that religion doesn’t contribute to and justify violence, it’s just good evidence that religion generally is self-contradictory and subjective, a spectacular failure at investigating truth and finding facts.

The news that the huge government bailout of the banking sector has turned into an enormously costly mess will surprise nobody smarter than Matt Yglesias, but the details are worth pointing out:

The federal bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could more than double in size during the next three years, according to projections from the companies’ federal regulator.

Fannie and Freddie, the federally-controlled mortgage finance giants, will likely need at least another $73 billion and perhaps as much $215 billion from taxpayers in the next three years to meet their financial obligations, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said.

You mean, having the Federal Government buy up enormous piles of underwater and fraud mortgages with no oversight, intentionally paying far more than they’re actually worth, might be *costly*?

Nah!

Dday hits the nail on the head here:

Quick question: Where are the Fannie and Freddie losses coming from? Answer: bad loans they bought. Quick question: Where did the bad loans come from? Answer: the banks.

I love this line in the piece: “The projections of additional bailouts for Fannie and Freddie are in sharp contrast to recent discussions by the Obama administration about how the bank rescue known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program, originally valued a $700 billion, is expected to cost taxpayers less than a tenth of that.” Yeah, there’s a reason for that “contrast.” It’s because the losses of TARP are being realized in Fannie and Freddie.

Here’s how this worked: the vast majority of the actual bank bailouts didn’t occur in TARP; it occurred through a wide array of other special programs that shoveled money onto banksters’ books or took off toxic garbage from those same books, along with accounting trickery like ending mark to market. (Dday pointed out some of this in an earlier piece, along with the fact that the AIG losses we’ve had to pay should count against the ‘profit’ from TARP, that a no-strings attached bailout now encourages more recklessness in future, etc)

Not that this entirely predictable turn of events will trouble Matt Ygelsias, who claimed that TARP would have a ‘negative cost’ to government. Right. Negative tens, perhaps hundreds of billions, Matt?

Or DougJ at Balloon Juice (motto: If We Say It’s Sunny, Please Bring Your Umbrella), who said of TARP (while adding a small proviso about AIG losses):

It didn’t cost $700 billion either, in the end, it’s pretty close to break even. Yeah, they should have settled AIG’s credit default swaps for 60 cents on the dollar (or something like that), but it wasn’t a pointless $700 billion give-away to fat cat bankstas.

Or Mistermix at BJ, who today was trumpeting the entirely fictional 8.25% rate of return on the bank bailouts while asking if, considering the enormous, Earth-shattering risks we took on to bailout Wall Street, perhaps we should have gotten slightly more cash.

Once again I can say I was right on this issue early thanks to Ian Welsh, who kindly took the time to explain, way back in August of 2009, why TARP’s ‘profits’ were and would always be nothing more than accounting sleight of hand:

TARP is making money because it was decided that it had to make money. So instead of forcing banks to take losses, or withdrawing special loan facilities, or ending concessionary rates, or making banks retire guaranteed bond issues and reissue them without the guarantee the banks were encouraged to “repay” TARP.

But if you think that means that the overall panolpy of government aid to banks was profitable, you aren’t looking at the whole picture. It’s like making 5 loans to your deadbeat cousin, and he pays back one while not being able to pay back the others and you say “I made a profit!” Not yet.

But I’m sure Bernanke and Geithner are pleased that so many folks have fallen for their shell game.

There’s a sucker born every minute, and half of them grow up to shill for Obama.